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| Gail Hannemann – CEO of the Girls Scout Council of Hawaii, First Lady of Honolulu |
 PRINTABLE VERSION |
Evan Leong: Welcome to Greater Good Radio, Hawaii, where we develop tomorrow's leaders by bringing you up close and personal with today's top businesspeople. Greater Good, Hawaii, is dedicated to social entrepreneurship. I'm your host, Evan Leong, and with me is my co-host, Kari Leong.
Kari Leong: Thank you, Evan. Today's guest is Gail Mukaihata Hannemann, CEO of the Girl Scout Council of Hawaii, and wife of Honolulu mayor Mufi Hannemann. Gail is also the Chairwoman of the Hawaii Alliance for Arts Education. Please welcome to Greater Good Radio, Gail Mukaihata Hannemann. Welcome to our show, Gail.
Gail Hannemann: Thank you. Thank you for having me.
KL: You are the CEO of the Girl Scouts' Council of Hawaii. Can you tell us a little bit about your role and what you do with them?
GH: Well, the Girl Scouts is obviously, our focus is to help girls develop; and so, there's a program side to it and there's a business side of it, and I oversee both aspects of the organization in that regard.
KL: And why did you get involved in the Girl Scouts?
GH: Actually, I had been sitting on the Board, and they had been doing a search for an Executive Director at that time, and somebody approached me, part of the search committee approached me to do it. And initially I said, "no," and said "no" several times, and then eventually I thought I should take a look at it, and did, and went through the interviewing process, and then found out that it actually is an excellent job, something that I would really want to do.
EL: Why did you say no, initially?
GH: Because I just never even considered working for a non-profit, it's actually my first non-profit job. I had, in my mind, other things that I was going to do, some of the things that I was going to pursue. But the one thing I have found in life is sometimes when things come to you in interesting and different ways that you have to stop and take a look at it, because sometimes, many times, people say that they don't have opportunities, when in fact opportunities came and went because they weren't looking. They didn't realize it was an opportunity.
KL: Were you a Girl Scout when you were younger?
GH: I actually was. [laughs]
KL: So you knew a little bit about the organization.
GH: Well, as a girl you don't realize the organization, the business side of it, which is what my job entails. But as a girl you just think about the fun, and the things that you do. So I think I understood it in a sense that it's something that I remembered, and it was a very positive experience, and I learned some new skills in that, when I was a Girl Scout I learned how to horseback-ride. I learned how to do archery. I learned how to ice-skate. Things of that nature. Which, actually, I have all used those things as I got older.
EL: How did you get involved with, you know, with this business career? Because it seems like you started off in social service, almost.
GH: I started off by accident, almost, in public service. I went to Washington, DC, for summer for two months, and I ended up spending 15 years there. So it wasn't something I had planned. But when I got to DC I saw that there were some, a lot of things going on that I had no understanding, or really didn't have any context for, but I realized that people were making important decisions that would affect my life at some level. So at some point I felt like it was worth spending that time to get to know that. And in that process, though, because Congress really deals with just about every conceivable subject matter you can think of, from the social sector side to the business side, you're looking at laws that affect businesses and monetary growth, etc. that it gave me a really good background and sort of awakened the passion in me, I guess, for lack of a better word, of understanding how you could take something that's really interesting to you and actually make it a career. One of the things that I really learned in Washington is you meet all kinds of people there. And if you ever sat down and talked to them and you asked them what they studied in school, it would be X. And if you look at what they're doing, it was Y. It was so different. And it really taught me or made me think about how you can really carve out your future. And when you really think about it and you talk to these folks, they were all basically pursuing things that they found interesting in their own life, and I think that helped me decide what to do.
KL: What, originally, took you to Washington, DC?
GH: I shouldn't really admit this but I actually just liked to travel. And every summer since I had been 14 I had always gone somewhere during the summer. And I had always wanted to go to college back East, but because there were four girls in my family, three of us were going to be in college at the same time, we took the practical path of not travelling outside. I grew up in California. So California has some incredible, great schools. So we all chose to go to California schools. And so I thought, it was my last summer, my senior year and I thought, "I'm going to figure out how to go back East." So I literally walked around the campus and I somehow found a program that could take me to back East. So I applied for the program and ended up getting a job.
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Jay-R Patron
Jay-R Patron, 24 years old, currently works as content provider for a multinational IT consultancy firm, under its interactive marketing department.
He was a writer for Hawaii-based Greater Good Inc., a media company behind the much-acclaimed Greater Good Radio. The show promotes social entrepreneurship and servant leadership.
Jay-r is a Journalism and Communication and Media Studies graduate from the University of Southern Queensland.
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